No Shortcuts to Culture: Indonesian Multi-hop Question Answering for Complex Cultural Understanding

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03709v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:32:00 GMT
• Title: No Shortcuts to Culture: Indonesian Multi-hop Question Answering for Complex Cultural Understanding
• Authors: Vynska Amalia Permadi, Xingwei Tan, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Nikos Aletras,
• Abstract summary: We introduce ID-MoCQA, the first large-scale multi-hop QA dataset for assessing the cultural understanding of large language models.<n>We present a new framework that transforms single-hop cultural questions into multi-hop reasoning chains spanning six clue types.
• Score: 10.749595729794692
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Understanding culture requires reasoning across context, tradition, and implicit social knowledge, far beyond recalling isolated facts. Yet most culturally focused question answering (QA) benchmarks rely on single-hop questions, which may allow models to exploit shallow cues rather than demonstrate genuine cultural reasoning. In this work, we introduce ID-MoCQA, the first large-scale multi-hop QA dataset for assessing the cultural understanding of large language models (LLMs), grounded in Indonesian traditions and available in both English and Indonesian. We present a new framework that systematically transforms single-hop cultural questions into multi-hop reasoning chains spanning six clue types (e.g., commonsense, temporal, geographical). Our multi-stage validation pipeline, combining expert review and LLM-as-a-judge filtering, ensures high-quality question-answer pairs. Our evaluation across state-of-the-art models reveals substantial gaps in cultural reasoning, particularly in tasks requiring nuanced inference. ID-MoCQA provides a challenging and essential benchmark for advancing the cultural competency of LLMs.

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